TELEVISION

TELEVISION;A Church Resurges, Bearing Music

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

Published: April 28, 1996

Correction Appended

IF REPRESSION CAN BE HEARD TO CRUMBLE, it is in the brittle peal and cascading play of Russian church bells. More, it is in the sinuous, subtle lines, the rooted, resonant tones and the close, colliding harmonies spun out in majesty by the church choir; in the sturdy syllables of Old Slavonic, a language kept alive by the Russian Orthodox Church.

These are sounds now rising throughout Russia on the crest of a religious resurgence since the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. They are also heard in a steady stream of recordings of Russian liturgical music making its way to the West: something new under the sun, since the faith was driven underground in the Soviet Union in the 1920's, at the dawn of the recording era.

On the Western front, meanwhile, excellent editions of the music and valuable information about it are being made available by Musica Russica, a small, dedicated publishing house in Madison, Conn. And high-profile performances, like Robert Shaw's presentation of the Rachmaninoff Vespers on Thursday evening with a select chorus of 80 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan, are becoming more frequent.

Of course, the big record companies issuing this material in the West are motivated not by any vague religious or political sympathies but by commercial concerns. The packaging of many releases betrays a widespread hope that the Russian repertory will attach itself to the current boom in all things musico-mystical, from Gregorian chant to the spiritual Minimalism emanating from the former Soviet Union. The cover of RCA Victor's "Ancient Echoes," for example, sports a generic hooded monk levitating above a snowfield outside a generic Russian city. Too predictably, the album contains nothing more ancient than music of Dmitri Bortniansky, who died in 1825. Such ploys do more to conceal than to reveal the vastness and diversity of the body of music that has grown up around the Russian church over 10 centuries and lain idle through most of this one.

"This is one of the few absolutely untouched repertoires in the 20th century, especially among the concertgoing and CD-buying public of North America," said Mark Bailey, who teaches liturgical composition and choral technique at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, north of New York City, and directs the Yale Russian Chorus in New Haven, where he lives.

On the surface, the music may seem to resemble Western plainchant, as indeed some of it does. The Russian church has its own rich store of early chant, and all of its music, no matter how grand or complex, is written for a cappella chorus, sometimes with vocal soloists.

The use of instruments has always been forbidden in the Russian church. Mr. Shaw has revealed plans to add interludes on chimes during the Vespers; however useful to keep the chorus in tune and however evocative of the sound of outdoor church bells, the practice runs counter to the Orthodox sensibility.

"As for the noise and droning of . . . organs, Justin the Philosopher-Martyr condemns it, and it was never accepted in the Eastern Church," Patriarch Meletios Pigas wrote in the 1590's. Another document of the period rejects the use of the organ as "inanimate whining." (Paradoxically, the great choruses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were typically praised by comparing their sound, in its clarity, solidity and balance, to that of the organ.)

BUT IN NONSPECIALIST circles, the choral tradition in Russia has come to be identified not so much with plainchant as with harmonized chant and polyphony. Indeed, the textures may be dizzyingly complex, with as many as 12, 24 or even 48 independent voices. The music tends to claim full attention rather than recede into the background as fodder for meditation. The purpose is not to afford the listener an escape into an inner self but to draw the listener outward, to provide a "window to heaven," just as icons are meant to do in the visual realm.

"It has such extraordinarily deep roots in the folk culture of the people," Mr. Shaw said recently of Rachmaninoff's Vespers. "It has the same smell as their folklore. It's made of the same dirt."

The performance at St. John the Divine, sponsored by Carnegie Hall, represents the culmination of Carnegie's celebration of Mr. Shaw's 80th birthday, on Tuesday. Clearly he is enamored of this work, which he recorded beautifully in 1990 for Telarc, yet he has not ventured far beyond it into Russian liturgical repertory. Indeed, the Rachmaninoff has become the touchstone of the literature, available in a dozen or so recordings.

"Quite honestly, I do not necessarily rejoice when I see yet another recording of the Vespers," said Vladimir Morosan, who runs Musica Russica from a small office in his home in the quiet community of Madison, east of New Haven. The company published the complete sacred choral works of Rachmaninoff in 1994, edited by Mr. Morosan, and it sells most available recordings of Russian Orthodox music, and thus of the Rachmaninoff Vespers, by mail or telephone order.

Correction: April 28, 1996, Sunday A front-page picture caption in the Arts and Leisure section today, about the artist who painted the icon "The Trinity," reverses his names in some copies. He was Andrei Rublev.